Interview with Tibco CTO Matt Quinn: That two second advantage

October 13. Las Vegas. It is one day before Tibco's annual customer conference Tucon is about to kick off and Matt Quinn, the company's CTO, is busy setting up the stage with a crew in a big hall.

The public relations person informs Quinn that I am there and he leaves testing the set-up midway and comes to sit with me in a corner of the hall. We shake hands and exchange cards.

An affable man from Australia, he is clearly stressed out because of the big event but he laughs easily to put everyone at ease.

Matt Quinn's bio says he has been with Tibco for 14 years and during this time he has had several worldwide roles. Earlier in his Tibco career, Quinn was a global architect, responsible for the delivery of some of Tibco's largest implementations in diverse areas such as transportation and logistics, energy and finance. This was a hands-on role, building real systems architecture for production customers. As I interview him, I find that he is still very hands-on as a leader.

Soon we jump into a serious conversation. Given the setting, I ask him about this year's theme for Tucon 2013. "Let's talk about it at two levels," he says. "At one level, it really is a concept of extreme value in times of change. There is lot going on in IT, a lot of change is going on. What we want to see is how our customers using our software are providing extreme value. The other level is that we will be rolling out the three key focus areas for us as a company and those three are big data, integration, and cloud."

Next I ask him about Tibco's catch-phrase, "the two second advantage". Tibco's CEO Vivek Ranadive has made the phrase very commonplace in his company's context. My question to him is: Combing the two second advantage, what's your company's approach to Big Data?

"In some way it is contained in the two second advantage," he says. "A little bit of the right information a little bit before hand is worth more than all that happens six months after. So really when we look at big data we look at very different things. We look at data at rest (historical data such as data warehouses, data on disks, etc) and we look at data in motion (all of the events that are flowing right there). What you actually need to do is to blend together data at rest with data in motion to really truly operationalise big data."

Next I ask him about mobility and cloud: how is Tibco helping the CIO take advantage of mobility and cloud?